Postcard secrets from the Galápagos Islands

For centuries, visitors to the Galápagos Islands have left unstamped postcards in a barrel for their fellow travellers to deliver. What happened when one artist spent three weeks cycling around the British Isles, hand-delivering 22 of the cards?

Working as an artist demands frequent bouts of solitude and frugality, but every now and then my job whisks me off to some amazing places. In January 2007, I was invited to take part in an exhibition in Quito, Ecuador. On completing this project I seized the opportunity to travel to the Galápagos Islands – a volcanic archipelago straddling the equator, more than 500 miles off the west coast of mainland Ecuador.

During my boat tour I visited an island called Floreana. In previous centuries, Floreana provided safe anchorage and a plentiful food supply for the buccaneers and whalers who roamed the Pacific. I learned that seafarers who frequented the island would deposit their correspondence in a barrel lying on the main sandy beach. Subsequent travellers would sort through the barrel and deliver any items that were addressed to their next port of call. In this way, an informal, free postal service was established, and the stretch of beach became known as Post Office Bay.

To this day, an old barrel mounted on a pole functions as a makeshift letter box for the island. It is situated on a sandy track that leads up from the beach, sitting amid a collection of driftwood and debris that has been personalised by passing travellers over the years. Tourists are now invited to place a postcard without a stamp into the barrel, in the hope that a future visitor will one day pick it up and deliver it to its intended destination.

On hearing this story I was sceptical; it seemed little more than a novel way of selling postcards to impressionable tourists. But I was gradually charmed by the idea of an entirely free but incredibly slow postal service that runs on an economy of goodwill between strangers. So when I arrived at Post Office Bay, I sorted through hundreds of postcards, some of which had been in the barrel for years, and found 22 addressed to locations across the British Isles.

I intended to deliver them as soon as I returned to the UK, but more than two years passed before I had the time and funds necessary to realise my plan. In the summer of 2009, I set out on a journey to personally hand-deliver each postcard to its destination. I travelled by train and bicycle for almost three weeks, staying at little B&Bs and cheap hotels along the way.

While I was planning my trip, the postcards seemed to be brimming with potential – imbued with the prospect of an adventure that I was yet to have. I also perceived a certain poignancy in the humble, handwritten messages; they ossified a moment of absence between the sender and the recipient, and the slowly fading salutations spoke to the fact that all human relationships are subject to entropy and the passing of time.

The addresses written on the back of each postcard plotted the co-ordinates of my journey. So even though I was delivering the postcards, it felt like they were delivering me to the various addresses they bore. Starting from London, I went down to Dorset, through Dartmoor to Exmoor, up into Gloucestershire and then across to Wales. From there I took the ferry to Dublin and made my way over to the west of Northern Ireland. The next stop was Belfast, and then Glasgow via the ferry into Stranraer. After Stirling, the northernmost point of my trip, I slowly wound my way south, taking in Northumbria, Middlesbrough, Thirsk, Peterborough, Cambridge and East Anglia along the way.

The first three recipients were not at home when I arrived at their addresses, so I left a brief letter explaining how the postcards had arrived at each of their houses. However, as I cycled off at the end of that first day, I felt a sudden sense of anticlimax; as soon as I had delivered the postcards it was as if the revered status I had afforded them suddenly evaporated. They returned to being touristy tat, with garish and oversaturated images on one side, and banal platitudes scrawled on the reverse. I remember one recipient in particular looking at the postcard quite awkwardly, as if he could not quite tally its inherent tackiness with the weighty significance I had bestowed upon it.

However, once each recipient had a chance to process the story behind my journey, many offered me their hospitality. Tea and biscuits became an almost daily ritual, and I found myself slipping into a slightly more naive and polite version of myself in order to navigate the weirdness of turning up unannounced at the recipients' front doors. I noticed that the protocols of Britishness came to the fore in those situations – it opened up a common ground, allowing the recipient and I to manoeuvre more comfortably within what was quite an unusual set of circumstances.

Some moments on my bicycle were extremely gruelling – the Devonshire hills in the blazing heat and the outskirts of Glasgow in the driving rain – while others were simply breathtaking – pedalling through the Stirlingshire countryside and barrelling down the high coastal roads towards Chesil Beach. The addresses I visited ranged from a Victorian terrace in the Glaswegian suburbs to a sprawling private estate in the heart of the Northumbria national park.

I encountered many fascinating people throughout my trip: the ex-Olympian jockey who let me sleep in his horse box when all the local rooms were full; the parish councillor whose chickens roamed freely through her house; the Glaswegian couple lured to Middlesbrough to work at the huge factory that loomed beyond their back garden, who proudly named their house after their Scottish clan; the friendly cheese farmer who sent me on my way with packets of her award-winning Cheddar; the horse dealer with a sad smile and watery eyes who charmed me with stories over a bottle of red wine; the ecologist in Cambridge who warned of the huge environmental challenges facing the Galápagos due to tourism, overfishing and invasive species; the bemused employee of a retired Lord Lieutenant who received an innuendo-laden postcard from his boss; the ex-British soldier who, having served in Northern Ireland and now living in the South, was anxious to keep his military past a secret; the doctor's secretary who was touched to receive a postcard from an ex-patient who had vowed to travel to the Galápagos as soon as he was well again.

I also discovered an incredible story from Floreana's past. Some of the island's first settlers were a German couple called Dore Strauch and Friedrich Ritter. Facing the prospect of living without dental care on the remote island, they had all their teeth taken out and replaced with steel dentures. Strauch and Ritter made Floreana their home in 1929, but other settlers soon ruined the sanctity of their isolated abode. In 1934, Ritter died a slow and agonising death after unwittingly eating a foul piece of meat, whereupon Strauch returned to Germany and wrote a book about her adventures on Floreana. Some of the other settlers – including Ritter himself – believed that Strauch deliberately sabotaged the meat, though she always maintained her innocence.

On the harsher, more exhausting days of my trip, I would ask myself to what extent I was simply enduring the experience in order to recount a more romanticised version of it at a later date. But there were also times when I was gripped by an exuberant joy as I set off to reunite another postcard with its intended recipient. In those moments I was truly grateful that an opportunistic discovery on a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean had ended up sending me on an adventure through my own country. Each postcard, with its gaudy depiction of a distant archipelago, became a portal through which I was able to discover the characters, complexities and contradictions of an altogether different set of islands – the British Isles.